Rockefeller Appears Short In Senate Bid

By TODD S. PURDUM

Published: July 29, 1992

Larry Rockefeller's Republican primary challenge to Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato appeared doomed yesterday, as he failed to file enough petition signatures to be sure of withstanding a legal challenge by Mr. D'Amato.

Mr. Rockefeller, a 47-year-old environmental lawyer making his first bid for public office, filed 10,774 signatures with the State Board of Elections, just 774 more than the 10,000 required to get on the ballot. Candidates generally try to file at least twice the required number of signatures to withstand an array of technical challenges under New York's arcane election laws.

The Rockefeller camp refused to concede defeat. But Mr. Rockefeller's failure to gather enough signatures to provide a margin of safety was partly due to his last-minute entry into the race, in a year when wrangling over Congressional redistricting cut the time for circulating petitions from six weeks to 18 days in all races.

It also reflected Mr. D'Amato's iron grip on the state party apparatus -- a standing army of expert petition-gatherers -- and the overwhelming complexity of the state's election law, under which signatures can be invalidated if the signers' addresses, Assembly districts and election districts are not all listed with total precision. Environmental Issues

It was never clear just what impact Mr. Rockefeller, a nephew of former Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and a great-grandson of the founder of the Standard Oil fortune, would have on Mr. D'Amato. The incumbent has more than $4 million in cash on hand and has already begun a radio advertising campaign that portrays him, in folksy tones, as a Senator who is "gettin' it done, makin' waves, takin' 'em on."

Mr. Rockefeller had vowed to spend no more than $250,000 of his own money, to forgo brief television commercials and to campaign on an environmental and abortion-rights platform, in an effort to revive the liberal New York Republicanism of his uncle's day.

Now he seems to have run squarely into the same sort of legal thicket that this year alone has bedeviled Presidential candidates as diverse as Patrick J. Buchanan and Paul E. Tsongas. The state's ballot-access requirements were amended somewhat as part a package of election law changes passed by the Legislature in May, and Mr. Rockefeller and his advisers said they hoped some of those changes would ease their way onto the ballot.

"Even if it's not known until the weekend before the election, so be it," Mr. Rockefeller said. "We're going to proceed full blown, right on." He said that if the petitions were disqualified he would a consider filing suit on the grounds that the shortened petition period had put him at a disadvantage and that petition gatherers had been intimidated and not given ready access to election maps by local Republican organizations.

But a spokeswoman for Senator D'Amato, Zenia Mucha, said Mr. Rockefeller's petitions did not appear to "meet the minimum requirements," and that the D'Amato campaign would challenge them.

"We will have more people looking at their petitions than he had signing them," she said. Mr. D'Amato himself did not have to file petitions to get on the ballot, having won the unanimous designation of the Republican State Committee in May. Mr. Rockefeller entered the race on July 8, the day before the legal date to start circulating petitions, having earlier considered and rejected a race. How Much of a Cushion?

Lawrence Mandelker, a veteran election lawyer representing Mr. Rockefeller, said he hoped the 34 volumes of signatures sent to Albany by registered mail Monday would stand up, both because of relaxed legal requirements and because of advance efforts to catch errors.

"Is it much of a cushion?" he asked. "Under the old law, not as much as I would like. Under the new law? Maybe."

He said several legal changes might help Mr. Rockefeller, including a provision that allows campaign workers to correct erroneous addresses or election districts without having them initialed by the person who witnessed the initial signing. Another change stipulates that if the witness statement at the bottom of a petition page understates the number of signatures on the page, only the difference between the statement and the actual list will be disqualified, instead of the entire page, as before.

Mr. Mandelker said Mr. Rockefeller's ability to gather even the signatures he did was an achievement.

"They came from nowhere, they had very little time and they were dealing with Republicans," Mr. Mandelker said, noting that in places like New York City, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 5 to 1.

William Harrison, a spokesman for the State Board of Elections, said the board accepted the Rockefeller petitions as valid, which simply means they met the total needed and did not have any "fatal flaws," like missing cover sheets or page numbers, or signatures jumbled together by Congressional district.

Mr. D'Amato, or anyone else, has until tomorrow to file a notice of general objections to the petitions, and until Tuesday to back the claim with specific charges. A Board of Election commissioner then holds a hearing, and any competing claims could wind up in court.

The chairman of the State Democratic Party, John A. Marino, said it appeared unlikely that Mr. Rockefeller could withstand a challenge, but said that would not make much difference one way or another for Mr. D'Amato's chances against the four Democrats vying to challenge him.